


We're the Crooked Kind

by hollowbones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-12 06:02:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1182749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollowbones/pseuds/hollowbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas, newly human, experiences his first nightmare. (Mildly AU, written between S8 and S9.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	We're the Crooked Kind

Castiel wakes up with the breath knocked out of him, as though he’s just fallen back to his body from a great height. The room is pitch black, and his heartbeat is a rough and panicked hammer between his ears as he fights the motel sheets that have twisted like serpents around his legs, still half-trapped when he stands and stumbles across the gap to the other bed. He trips and hits the mattress hard with one knee, already reaching blindly, hand dragging over skin he should be able to see, if he weren’t impotent, useless, human, digging his shaking fingers into the gap between shoulder and jaw where the pulsepoint lives in Dean’s neck and pressing into the space Sam taught him to find when he stopped being able to feel the presence of souls. 

There. The heavy rhythm of blood against the skin, moving fast, and the relief Castiel feels over the fact that Dean isn’t dead is barely touched by the feeling of cool metal against his temple and the sound of a hammer drawing back. Dean’s breathing is rough and angry under him, but Cas can only feel the half-numb, half-tingling flow of that adrenaline-soured relief coursing through him, and he is suddenly too exhausted to do anything but drop his forehead heavily against Dean’s chest and breathe out hot against the cotton of his t-shirt.

There is a long, silent pause, until Dean whispers, finally, “ _Cas_?” Castiel hears him thumb the hammer back down and drop the gun onto the bed. He keeps it under his pillow when they sleep, the “pea-shooter,” always next to a silver knife. He arranges them there every evening as part of what always looks like a ritual; it’s something to help it seem like they are safer. Castiel has found in his long life that it is best not to argue with someone’s ritual, no matter how many times it has failed. His fingers are still pressed hard against Dean’s skin, still feeling the ebbing beat of Dean’s heart, and the vibration in his throat when Dean asks, “What the hell are you doing?”

His voice is quiet even while it’s angry, because Sam is sleeping on a cot across the room. They trade from night to night, two rooms being too much of an expense for their normally tight and unpredictable budget, now stretched to include another mouth to feed. Their patience for him is incredible, and deeply undeserved. Dean complains about the cot when it’s his turn, but there is never anything real behind the words. They’re always just words to fill the space he knows needs filling. Cas takes a breath, filling his lungs with the smell of newly washed cotton, and answers softly, “I had to be sure.”

He can feel Dean’s breath calming beneath his forehead, which rises less violently with the swells as Dean pulls his own panic-awoken body back together. He grabs Cas’s wrist and tugs his pulse-seeking hand away, before pushing himself to sit up, forcing Cas to do the same. In the dark, two feet away, Cas’s adjusting eyes can see the hard set of Dean’s jaw, annoyed and uncertain at the same time. The electric twitch of adrenaline still prickles the skin of Cas’s arms and makes his throat feel narrow. This is one of the worst parts of being human. Chemicals. Physiology. Knowing their names doesn’t make their effects less intrusive, or make him feel any stronger for knowing what makes him weak. 

Dean stares hard at him with his eyebrows furrowed. “What happened?”

Cas shakes his head. He looks back over to the other bed, where the tangle of sheets still clings half to the mattress and half to his legs like a ball and chain. “You were all dying,” he says. He hates the sleep-rough sound of his voice, but mostly the helplessness in it. He couldn’t save them. They were all dying, and no matter what he did, he couldn’t save any of them.

There is a silent tick, a moment of understanding, and Dean sighs. “You were dreaming.” He rubs his face with both of his hands, pressing his fingers around his eyes. “We talked about this. It’s just dreams. Weird movies in your head.”

“This one was different.” The terror was real. The feeling of blood sluicing between his fingers as he pressed down on flesh that was hardly even flesh anymore, and someone screaming somewhere in the distance, a familiar voice he couldn’t place: those things were real. This reaction is real. Castiel can feel the way his shirt clings to his back with sweat, and his heartbeat is only just now slowing to something normal. 

Dean’s eyes drift over to the clock on the nightstand, where its thin red numbers dribble a weak light on the scuffed wood around it. He rubs at his face again, making a low, frustrated noise in his throat. “Look. It was a nightmare. I’m alive. You figured that out. Sam’s alive, you can hear him snoring,” he punctuates this with an arm thrown in Sam’s direction, “and anybody else you can call when the sun’s up someplace they speak English. So go back to bed, and don’t wake me up like that again. You’re so fucking lucky I didn’t shoot you in the head.”

Castiel feels an uncomfortable drop in his stomach. Sleep is a necessary evil, once fascinating, now frustrating, to lose control of his body for any amount of time, prone in the dark while his subconscious reorders itself and shows him visions in the runoff. He was aware of nightmares, but not like this. He didn’t know that they would be moments of his past, dragged out and pressed together, built into something newly horrible in combination, like a punishment enacted by his own brain. To sleep again now would be to risk going back to that, and despite the exhaustion he can feel moving through him in the wake of the adrenaline, more than anything he would like to avoid feeling the way he did when he woke up. Ever again, if possible.

So Cas shakes his head, and glances over at the pale outlines of the table and chairs by the window. “I’ll stay awake,” he says, moving to stand. “I’ll do research until you’re both--”

A hand grabs his arm, and he halts unexpectedly, halfway risen, to look at Dean’s face in the dark. There are equal parts frustration and sympathy warring there, and Castiel can’t remember when he got so proficient at facial expressions. It might just be Dean, and the way that he carries his emotions like they are physical things sometimes, dragging him down or lifting him up. Dean sighs, rolls his eyes, and reaches with his free hand to pull the blanket down on the other side of his bed. “I’m gonna regret this,” he mutters, then turns back to Cas and pats the space he’s made next to him with enough irony that even Cas’s spotty appreciation can detect it. “Get in.”

Cas is still for a long moment, with Dean’s hand still wrapped around his arm, looking at the vacant side of Dean’s bed. “Dean,” he says, his voice contained enough to be suitable despite the floods of shame and embarrassment that are battering his chest. “I’m not a child. You don’t have to coddle me.”

“Technically, you’ve only been human for a few months,” Dean points out with a humor that doesn’t make it to his face.

Cas closes his eyes. The worst part is that he wants what Dean is offering, and the weakness of it is insufferable. This is not a thing that Dean should offer, and it isn’t a thing that Castiel should accept. He is an ancient consciousness with a night terror, and the comfort Dean is offering is meant for children with irrational fears of the dark. Castiel knows why a fear of the dark is rational. He knows that he should refuse. 

But Dean is insistent. He tugs at Cas’s arm. “Come on. We need more than two hours of sleep in you tomorrow. If you think it won’t help, then fine, go and Google something until we get out of here in the morning. But you look like shit already. So just swallow your pride and get in the goddamn bed, Cas.”

If Dean was amused at all, Cas would refuse outright. The loss of sleep would balance the maintenance of respect. But Dean only looks tired, with that tinge of concern in his voice that Cas has learned to hear the way that one can learn to hear specific notes in a cacophony. This is a real offer for comfort, maybe the only comfort that Dean knows how to offer in this situation, and that, more than anything, is what makes the resistance drain from Cas’s shoulders. When Dean lets go, Cas silently makes his way around the bed and slips into the opposite side, beneath the blanket, leaving a strip of space as a buffer between himself and Dean.

Dean seems to relax immediately, settling back down to stare up at the ceiling as Cas arranges himself into a comfortable position and tries to quell the urge to get up again. He needs to sleep, and he won’t if he doesn’t do it here. This seems important to Dean. At least that’s what Cas will tell himself, when really the dream clings to the edges of his mind like brambles, and this proximity to Dean helps dull the itch of anxiety that clings with them.

Dean folds his hands over his chest, and he doesn’t look over at Cas, but he says, “I remember having a lot of nightmares as a kid. Spent a lot of nights sleeping between my parents.” Cas, on his side, can see Dean’s smirk in blurry profile in the dark, the light from the alarm clock just peeking over the lines of Dean’s nose and chin. “Bet they loved that.”

“Do you have many nightmares now?” Cas asks.

Dean is silent for a moment. “Honestly? I can’t remember the last time I had a dream that wasn’t a nightmare.”

The tired defeat in his voice twists something in Cas’s chest. Cas knows what fuels those nightmares, and he hates it, with a sudden and unexpected viciousness, because Dean doesn’t deserve to carry Hell with him at all times. And the fact that there is _more_ than just Hell, or Purgatory – the staggering amount of loss and heartbreak and betrayal that Dean has experienced from almost everyone in his life, including Cas, is the sort of thing that would crush lesser men, but he is still able to sleep and rise up and keep moving. Castiel knows what Heaven thinks of Dean and Sam, and he has heard what Hell thinks of them, but they are not just meddling apes with a narrow lucky streak. They are righteous. They have a strength that Cas is only now just understanding, in trying to emulate it, in trying to keep moving. That they haven’t been hardened by this life, that Dean can still offer childish comforts for a friend’s first nightmare despite watching everyone he has ever loved die, speaks of a strength that Cas knows he will never be able to attain. He can reach for it, but it will always allude him. He is too old for faith.

“I never had a childhood the way you did,” Cas says instead of any of this, shifting against the too-soft hotel pillow, “but I was young, and I occasionally needed the sort of reassurance that a child would, when God’s world and our responsibility to it seemed too much for me.”

Dean’s eyes flick with interest in his direction. “Who’d do that for you up there?”

Cas’s mouth tugs with a small smirk that he can’t help, and he answers with a little humor, “As hard as it is to believe, Gabriel was once very kind.”

Dean snorts and rolls onto his side, facing away from Cas, muttering to himself, but the only word Cas can catch of the comment is “dick.” The familiar appellation warms Cas, strangely, and settles his smirk into something like a smile. It spreads slightly when Dean says after a moment, a little muffled, “I guess family’s family.” 

Cas has lost his family. It is entirely through his own doing, fighting for what he believed was right, making mistake after mistake after mistake that left his home decimated and then destroyed. No matter what he does now to right those wrongs, they will always have happened, and he will always feel the weight of those choices. He will never be a true part of the Host again, no matter what form the Host takes in the future.

But he has this. He has roads stretching hundreds of miles into the distance and a car that has begun to feel like a home. He has two men who train him how to use this body as more than just a vessel, how to protect it but not fear so much for it that he is paralyzed inside of it. He has a path and a mission and the means by which to accomplish it, with the hand of a friend on each shoulder, propelling him forward when the easiest option would be to collapse.

But mostly he has Dean, whose breathing has begun to even out, whose radiant heat leeches out to warm the space between them where Cas’s hand rests on the sheets. Dean believes in family the way that some men believe in God. And somehow, in this chaotic clash of time and alliances and loyalty, Cas has found himself included in the circle of Dean’s family. Cas is never more than three steps from his next mistake, but Dean Winchester forgives him always. It’s a comfort when nothing else can be. Cas would do it again, all of it, every trip and stumble, every second of death and Hell and Purgatory, if it still brought with it this level of faith that Dean has in him. It is the only thing that keeps him sane, some days. It is always the only thing that keeps him safe.

It’s the thing that draws him back towards sleep, sinking down with his breath in time to the sleeping body on the other side of the bed. There are nightmares, and there will always be nightmares – but when they’re gone, the thing that will always be there, buoying him up, giving him this new breed of grace, is Dean’s undeserved, heavily tested, and entirely unbreakable faith in a fallen, broken angel of the Lord. 

 

 

Dean wakes up with something warm pressed all along his left side, and for a few really good seconds he mentally congratulates himself for adding a new name to the List of Women Pleased by Dean Winchester – but then he opens his eyes, and in the flimsy light through the curtains, the motel room comes into focus, and he remembers: going to bed, then pressure from a hand on his chest and one on his neck, the split-second response drilled into his bones to being attacked in his sleep. But it was just Cas, with his wild hair and his terrified face, trying to take Dean’s pulse. The irony of shooting him would have really sucked. 

So the warmth, Dean confirms when he slowly turns his head to the left, is Cas. His face is completely blank in his sleep, which Dean guesses is better than a rictus of horror. He must have edged closer, because Dean distinctly remembers a big neutral zone between them when he fell asleep, but he thinks he understands why. Cas’s arm is stretched out towards Dean, and his palm is set against his shoulder. His fingers brush just a little against Dean’s neck, near his pulse point again. It would be creepy, Dean thinks, if it wasn’t so depressing. Like even in his sleep, Cas needs to be sure that everything isn’t all fucked up, and Dean’s still alive. 

The rest of Cas is rolled against him, and it strikes Dean, definitely not for the first time, how different Cas’s body is now that he’s human. He creates actual heat now, instead of just enough to keep his vessel alive. It rolls off of him, like he’s forgotten how to regulate it. And he smells different. It used to be that whenever he snapped in from somewhere, he smelled like the air after it snowed. That weird not-smell. It made it even more obvious that Cas wasn’t actually human, just borrowing a person-suit. But now he smells like a guy, Dean can’t help but notice, inches away; he smells like shampoo and sweat, and it’s weird. After he fell for good, they had to convince him to start rotating clothes and showering, because he actually makes things dirty now by wearing them, outside of the blood and stains he used to be able to magic away. 

God, those first few weeks sucked.

Sam shifts and burrows deeper into the cushions on the couch across the room, and Dean sighs and decides that he’s officially awake, and he should get out of this creepily misunderstandable position before Sam sees. He carefully levers himself out of bed, keeping his old-man groans about his sore back and legs to a low volume and letting Cas’s outstretched hand fall gently to the sheets. A vaguely worried expression crosses his face when Dean isn’t there anymore, but he doesn’t wake up, so Dean considers it a victory and pads across to the bathroom for his morning piss.

 

Sam wakes up when Dean is in the middle of brushing his teeth, and shows up slumped in the doorway behind Dean in the mirror. Dean raises his eyebrows in greeting, and Sam just squints at him and pushes his hair out of his face. It’s been a few months now, but Dean’s eyes still linger on Sam at first, checking for anything to worry about. They learned pretty fast that when Heavenly mojo decides to vacate the premises, it does it in a big, sloppy way; giving up at the end of the last trial almost killed Sam, and Dean doesn’t know how far out of the woods they are yet. He’s walking around and talking, and that’s fine for now, but the worry’s still there. Sam looks fine. A little tired, probably, but that’s sleeping on a couch for you.

Sam puts his head against the doorframe like he doesn’t have the strength to hold it up. “Why’s Cas sleeping in your bed?”

Dean pauses mid-brush. He can see his own face fall around his toothbrush in the mirror. He forgot that he’d have to explain this. So he stalls; he finishes with his teeth, spits, wipes his mouth with a motel towel whose previous whereabouts he doesn’t want to dwell on at all. When he finally meets Sam’s eyes in the mirror again, Sam looks more awake and more annoyed, so Dean sighs and turns around to face him, leaning back against the sink. 

“First nightmare. I had to make him go back to sleep.”

Sam just looks confused. “He woke you up for a nightmare?”

“He kind of attacked me.”

Sam’s eyebrows shoot up and his mouth opens with probably a thousand questions, but Dean just holds up a hand. “He thought we were dead. It screwed him up for a minute. I talked him down. You should maybe go over pulse-taking etiquette with him again, though. I thought he was trying to strangle me.”

Sam’s mouth twitches, and he tries to hide it by looking away, but Dean catches it and scowls. Sam just shrugs in response, letting the smirk stretch over his whole dumb face. “Sorry, dude, but – maybe he thought you were into that kind of thing?”

Dean throws his toothbrush, Sam’s toothbrush, the motel soap, the bottle of toothpaste and the towel at Sam, who tries to laugh quietly enough not to wake Cas with both of his hands up and his head ducked so he doesn’t get knocked out by Dean’s onslaught. When Dean’s out of things to throw, he considers throwing the sink, but then they’d have to pay for it or run, and he wanted to have a leisurely morning. So he just keeps scowling, and watches as Sam’s laughing peters out into a thoughtful expression. He glances over his shoulder at Dean’s bed, where Cas still sleeps silently. “I can’t tell if this is better or worse than the first few weeks.”

The fight goes out of Dean. He sighs. “Yeah, tell me about it.” 

“He’s getting better,” Sam points out. “He doesn’t slip out of it anymore. He’s learning what we teach him. It feels like he’s starting to get used to it.”

Dean’s shoulders hunch uncomfortably. “I don’t like it, Sam. He’s changing.”

“Getting human kinda does that to you, Dean.”

“I’m just saying,” Dean presses. “It’s like he lost something. Like when Metatron pulled the Grace out of him, all the hope dropped out, too. He’s—real. He used to be totally untouchable, but now he’s just Cas. He has nightmares and he freaks out and when he gets cut up he doesn’t heal. I don’t think he believes that we’re gonna win. He thinks he’s just doomed to fail forever.”

“He’s working off a lot of precedent there. But he’ll get there, Dean. Really.” Sam crosses his arms. “I mean, look at us. Look at all of the crap we’ve done. We’ve jumpstarted a couple of apocalypses and we’re still out there trying to fix things.”

“Because we have to.”

“ _I_ believe in us,” Sam says simply. “Even after everything we’ve screwed up, I still think that we can win. If I can manage that, Cas can, too. He’ll get there. He’s family. We’ll help him find his own redemption.”

Dean looks down at his own crossed arms. There’s a smile stretching across his face, closed-lipped but there, but he won’t show Sam. “Pulling all of that demon badness out of you really made you a little optimist, didn’t it?”

Sam snorts and shoves Dean’s shoulder. “Get out. You’re pretty enough. Go wake Cas up, we’ve gotta roll soon.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Dean ducks around Sam and out into the room, hearing the click of the door closing behind him. He crosses to the bed and sits on the side, where only Cas’s hair sticks out over the top of the blanket. He reaches out and shakes what he guesses is Cas’s shoulder. “Wakey wakey. Brand new day, Cas.”

Cas just groans and shifts further down into the bed, away from Dean’s hand. Deans smirks, and reaches over to shake him again.

Without even pulling the blanket down, Cas reaches under the pillow and pulls out the gun, then points it blindly at Dean. “Get. Off.”

Dean snorts, then stands up. “Ten more minutes. Then we’re gone.”

The gun goes back under the pillow. Cas’s shoulders smooth out, and his breathing slows again.

And Dean thinks, optimistically, that maybe things are going to be okay.


End file.
